Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

Search form

Tag: House Republicans

In December 2010, I wrote that “An indicator of the incoming House Republican majority’s seriousness about cutting spending will be which members the party selects to head the various committees.” The final roster ended up leaving a lot to be desired from a limited government perspective. For example, the House Republican leadership and its allies went with Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY), aka “The Prince of Pork,” to head up the Appropriations Committee.

Two years later, the committee situation is about to get even worse now that the House Republican leadership has decided to send a message that casting a vote according to one’s beliefs instead of one’s instructions is a punishable offense. On Monday, four congressmen were booted from “plum” committee assignments for failing to sufficiently toe the leadership line. I suspect that the purge was motivated, at least in part, by Team Boehner’s desire to have the rest of the rank and file think twice before casting a “no” vote on whatever lousy deal is struck with the White House to avoid the “fiscal cliff.”

Three of the purged Republicans are returning members of the 2010 freshmen “Tea Party Class”: Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ), Justin Amash (R-MI), and Tim Huelskamp (R-KS). Over the past year, I have been keeping a loose record of how the freshmen voted on opportunities to eliminate programs and prevent spending increases. On seven particularly telling votes*, Schweikert and Amash voted in favor of limited government every time. Out of 87 freshmen, only Schweikert, Amash, and five others had a perfect record. Huelskamp was six for seven. He also was one of only four Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee to vote against the bloated farm bill that passed out of the committee in July. The fourth outcast, Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), had become an irritant to the Republican establishment after turning against the Iraq War and associating himself with more libertarian Republicans like Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).

*Votes were to terminate the Economic Development Administration, Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia, Essential Air Service program, Title 17 Energy Loan Guarantees, Community Block Development Grant program, against reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, and against the Continuing Appropriations Act in September.

When the burst of transparency effort that began in 2008 started flagging, I figured we should probably come up with something measurable. Over the last couple of years, we’ve created models of what legislative processes would look like if they were published as really good data. We’ve done the same with budgeting and spending information.

Next, we’ve been assessing how well that data is currently published. See my previous reports here and here. Some of it is the responsibility of Congress. Some is the responsibility of the White House. And some of it is a divided responsibility. The little “Capitol” and “White House” icons tell you which.

What that means is that there aren’t distinct identifiers computers could use to help us in organizing our oversight of the government. That makes it really, really hard to oversee the government. It makes it hard to gather what agencies, bureaus, projects, and programs are affected by the bills in Congress.

You know how easy it is to shop on Amazon or eBay? It should be that easy to keep track of what’s going in Congress. But the data isn’t there. That’s a failure of President Obama’s, who claimed he would deliver transparent government.

So here are the report cards we’ve produced, illustrating how Congress and the White House are doing on publishing data. None of the grades are very good, but where Congress has weak grades, the Obama Administration’s grades are horrible. The conclusion? Obama lags House Republicans on transparency.

When you look back at the grueling [sic] debate over an underwhelming $38 billion in spending cuts, you realize the fight was never about cutting spending–it was over how much to grow the size and scope of government:

Last year the House Republican leadership created the GOP’s “YouCut” website, which offers several possible spending cuts for citizens to vote on. The cut with the most votes goes to the House floor for an up-or-down vote. It’s a decent idea, but unfortunately, most of the cuts the GOP have offered thus far only amount to chump change.

This week the House Republican leadership finally put the Pentagon on the YouCut chopping block. However, the possible cuts suggested by the GOP are pathetic:

1. Reduce the Department of Defense’s printing and reproduction budget by 10 percent ($36 million in savings in fiscal 2012).

2. Reduce spending for Defense studies, analysis and evaluations by 10 percent ($24 million in savings in fiscal 2012).

To put the potential “savings” in perspective, the United States’ latest act of military adventurism (Libya) has already cost taxpayers $550 million. Take that military-industrial complex!

The Washington Times recently reported that Sen. Rand Paul’s balanced budget plan drew “several fairly vocal objections to it” from his GOP colleagues because he dared to include defense cuts. Indeed, House Republicans left the Pentagon alone when coming up with $61 billion in cuts to discretionary programs for the remainder of the fiscal year.

“At the end of the day, even when you take out the cost of the wars, military spending in the base budget has grown close to $1 trillion since 2000,” said Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign-policy studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “So, I think there is kind of a growing realization that the cost that we have incurred on behalf of a lot of other places around the world are growing increasingly burdensome, and the military has not exactly been starved of funds.”

The YouCut website says that it “is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress.” Nice line, but when it comes to the Pentagon, it appears that the Republican leadership continues to be a-okay with runaway spending. That mentality will hopefully be forced to change due to the government’s sorry fiscal state of affairs. If it does, a Cato essay has plenty of good suggestions for military spending cuts.